Documenting Maori History

Documenting Maori History: THE ARREST OF TE KOOTI RIKIRANGI TE TURUKI, 1889* TRUTH is ever a casualty of war and of the aftermath of war and so it is of the conflicts between Maori and Pakeha in New Zealand. A bare hun- dred years is too short a time for both peoples, still somewhat uncertainly working out their relationships in New Zealand, to view the nineteenth- century conflicts with much objectivity. Indeed, partly due to the con- fidence and articulateness of the younger generations of Maoris and to their dissatisfaction with the Pakeha descriptions of what is and what happened, the covers have only in the last decade or so really begun to be ripped off the struggles of a century before. Some truth is emerging, in the sense of reasonably accurate statements about who did what and why, but so inevitably is a great deal of myth-making, of the casting of villains and the erection of culture-heroes by Maoris to match the villains and culture-heroes which were created earlier by the Pakeha—and which many Pakeha of a post-imperial generation now themselves find very inadequate. In all of this academics are going to become involved, partly because they are going to be dragged into it by the public, by their students and by the media, and partly because it is going to be difficult for some of them to resist the heady attractions of playing to the gallery of one set or another of protagonists or polemicists, frequently eager to have the presumed authority of an academic imprimatur on their particular ver- sion of what is supposed to have happened. At this rather crucial stage of the unfolding of New Zealand national life one cannot but regret how late qualified, professional historians began seriously to explore Anglo-Maori relations in this country. Keith Sinclair really opened a new era with the Origins of the Maori Wars in * The man known as Te Kooti Rikirangi took the name Te Kooti at his Christian baptism, almost certainly after Dandeson Coates, Lay Secretary of the Church Missionary Society. After his imprisonment and escape from the Chatham Islands he preferred to use one of his father's names, Te Turuki. Of a dozen or more letters signed by him and still surviving in the National Archives most are signed 'Te Turuki', one is signed 'Te Kooti te Turuki', and one is signed 'Te Turuki te Kooti'. He was apparantly still (in the 1870s and 1880s) trying to accommodate Pakeha readers (to whom the two letters were addressed) by sometimes re- taining the baptisimal name by which they knew him. I have also retained it for the most part in this article because he is still generally known by most Pakeha and Maoris as 'Te Kooti', though in his own family and district the preferred name is Te Turuki, a name in turn taken by descendants and co-religionists. 25 26 ALAN WARD 1957; and there are still comparatively few historians publishing in this general area. Still more must one regret, though one may understand the reasons, the lack of trained publishing Maori historians. Most Maori students of modern Maori history appear to be forming their evaluations in the context of anthropology or 'Maori studies', where the reading of detailed scholarly history is perhaps encouraged but not always required. Anthropological research itself has paid very little attention to the evolution of Maori society under contact. There has been much strenuous endeavour to recreate the classical Maori past (often in a form as sterile as it is static) and some thorough studies of modern Maori in urban or rural locations—often excellent in their descriptions of material life and relationships but still rather barren as regards the life of the mind. As more recent anthropology has moved increasingly from func- tionalist approaches to the study of culture in change and cultures inter- acting with other cultures so modern 'Maori studies' specialists have also begun to present their versions of what happened between 1769 and, say, 1945. Thus, in her revised edition of The Maoris of New Zealand, between twenty-eight pages on the Maori before 1800 and 300 pages on the Maori today, Professor Joan Metge inserts ten pages on 'The years between'. One must commend Joan Metge for the richness of her contemporary material, and the accuracy of her short historical statement, and probably also her restraint at not attempting more of what she is not trained to do. But my fear is that many students of 'Maori studies' will never read more history than these ten pages. And ten pages are not enough to show what powerful historical influences, what complex social action and cultural influences have made Joe Hawke and Ben Couch and Brigadier Poananga, Pat Hohepa or Sidney Mead what they are and why they are so different from one another! There are whole dimensions missing here. Another recent (1977) work which shows some signs of becoming a classic in the 'Maori studies' field is Professor Hugh Kawharu's Maori Land Tenure, published by the prestigious Clarendon Press and priced at over $30. This too contains a historical survey compounded from 'a limited range of published sources long familiar to students of the subject'.1 'Long familiar' is right: given the reliance on Cowan (1922), Kee- sing (1928), Belshaw (1940) and Smith (1948), and nothing later than Ian Wards (1968)! The book stops short with the notorious 1967 legislation, and does not note even in an addendum to the author's preface, itself written in 1976, the amending legislation which followed under a Labour government. A subject of such fundamental importance and present political dynamite as land tenure surely deserves to be supported by the most up-to-date available historical (and other) researches on the subject. 1 Hugh Kawharu, Maori Land Tenure, Oxford, 1977. DOCUMENTING MAORI HISTORY 27 In the modern intellectual confrontation that urbanization and educa- tion have produced, much will depend upon the frankness and the industry of the historians of cultural interaction—including the anthro- pologists and 'Maori studies' professors turned historians. Potted histories, rehashed old histories, are not much use in this. The intellectual leaders of both races, and the media which publicize some of their statements, should surely drink deep, not sip at this most sensitive area of New Zealand history. In doing so, they should have regard to the documentary record, and its still largely unexplored riches. The recent vogue for oral history has of course proved valuable. Michael King, in his biography of Te Puea, has shown what it can reveal. But Dr King has himself noted the limitations of oral history, notably the warping effects of recounting over time, and the cultural purposes of the recounting—namely to support important values and myths rather than to strive for objectivity.2 Not that the quest for the Holy Grail of a single objective truth is the proper preoccupation of the documentary historian either, since documents too are created by the protagonists in events, and reflect their various standpoints about events or issues as they see them or reflect on them. But it remains the professional historian's task to unravel these various 'truths'—the events, the interpretations of events and myths about events—usually in relation to larger issues or questions, and to help readers make more informed judgments about them. In this context the stock-in-trade questions of who first said what, and why, put the documentary historian at an advantage. For documents—primary, contemporary documents—do have the virtue of a certain stability, of cap- turing and freezing the thoughts and utterances of contemporary participants and defying subsequent interpretation and retelling. The other important point to appreciate regarding documents about modern New Zealand history is their abundance. This includes documents written by Maori. It is perhaps not fully appreciated how much the Maori, being a literate people by the mid-nineteenth century, used their new-found talent and wrote letters, frequently, to each other and to government officials. Indeed, because of factionalism and conten- tion among leaders, there was usually a veritable flow of intelligence about almost any important development. A great many letters have sur- vived in the files of the various government officers and are now located in the National Archives. The records of local courts, and journals and letter books kept by magistrates contain very full revelations over time, of the people and events of a local community. The minutes and evidence compiled by the Native Affairs Committee of Parliament contain voluminous records about particular issues such as land claims, and the 2 Michael King, 'New Zealand Oral History: some cultural and methodological con- siderations', New Zealand Journal of History, XII, 2 (October 1978), 104-23. 28 ALAN WARD people concerned about them. So of course do the records of the Native Land Court. Much of this has not yet been used by historians. Political and religious gatherings by Maoris were frequently reported quite exten- sively and verbatim speeches often recorded. With the necessary allowance for bias, misreporting and mistranslation with which all documents must be treated, it is nevertheless possible to get rich insights from these.' Putting all this together, along with missionary archives and published material such as local newspapers, it is often possible to build up a very full picture of Maori history in the nineteenth century—a great wealth of detail about the Maori people of the area, their social condition, the pressures upon them, their activities, their leaders, their belief systems. Oliver and Thompson's history of the East Coast," particularly the detailed study of how the Poverty Bay Maori came to be involved in their terrible and unnecessary military confrontation with government forces, is an illustration of what is possible, and before the nineteenth-century history of the Maori can become very full I believe there need to be more such local studies, based on the documentary material.

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